Sunday, March 16, 2008

Harvard Association Project: Implicit

My cousin showed this to me "Implicit Association Test" and tried it himself with the "Race" test and it concluded that he "slightly" preferred white people to black people.

It has many tests concerning many subjects which "americans" are considered to be biased on, such as:- Weight (fat or slim)- Sexuality (gay or straight)- Religion (Judaism or Others)- Ethnicity (Arab-Muslims or Others)and so on... even:- 2008 Presidential Candidates.

So I took the Religion one and it basically was trying to see how anti-semetic I was. The method is simple and effective, it tells you to place two fingers on the keys E and I. and asks you to press E(left) for example if you see a word associated with Good (pleasure, beautiful,etc.), and I(right) if you see a word associated with Bad (Hate, Agony..etc.). So it trains you to use a certain finger for a certain part of your brain that "likes" stuff, and the other finger for the "hated" stuff.

It later assigns pictures of the star of david, the Torah, and other Judaic symbols to one finger, and other images resembling other religions to the other finger, and measures the speed with which your brain responds. It then switches the fingers and measures again. To be fair.

So by seeing how readily your brain accepts each configuration, it gives you a rating of how "biased" are you towards or against that specific symbolism. I thought it was smart. It IS an academic project after all.

In the end it told me I had a "slight" inclination against Judaism as opposed to other religions, which I guess isn't too far from the truth.

After that I took another test about Arab/Muslims, and the result was that I was "moderately" biased "towards" Arab/Muslims compared to "other people". Which is ofcourse not surprising. But also it showed me the overall results they got from other people who took that test:

Which clearly shows that there's a very significant tendency to prefer Other People to Arab/Muslims among those who took the test (I'm assuming most of them were Harvard students and their friends and families .etc).

I guess it shows that Everyone's a Little Bit Racist:

Please try out some of the tests and share your results!

(my wife's sister has been noticed to judge people and couples based on how "pretty" they are, and she denies this strongly. I also know that when she was little, she used to pinch the girls in her class which she thought were ugly! hah. amazing, I'll see what she gets on one of these tests if I can find one related to looks...)

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Update: My wife just took the age preference test and she said to me clearly before she took it that she strongly preferred Old people to Young. Her result was "Moderate automatic preference for Young compared to Old"! and this is the overall: